Yancy when Ace was eighteen.” A wistful smile curved the older woman’s lips. “A logging accident. It was hard, even though Ace was grown and away at school. Maybe harder since he wasn’t around to share my grief.”
Meg wondered what Nita Allen would say if she knew Meg felt no grief, only joy. This gentle woman who’d had a good husband wouldn’t understand that.
“I think it was the quiet that was the most disturbing,” Nita confessed.
The blessed, blessed quiet... No cursing. No yelling. No foul name-calling...
“Yancy was so big and blustery and fun-loving, he kept everyone laughing so hard they could hardly breathe when he was around, especially when he’d get to singing those Irish ditties.”
Elton had kept everyone on pins and needles. Afraid to breathe. Afraid to do or say anything for fear of it being wrong. And no one felt like singing in his presence.
“Your husband was Irish?” Meg asked, clinging to the single fact that jumped out at her.
“He was,” Nita said with a reminiscing smile. “And as handsome as could be. Ace got his blue eyes from his father, though Yancy’s were not so light as Ace’s.”
Meg found the notion of two people marrying from such disparate upbringings an intriguing notion. “Was it difficult, the two of you having such different backgrounds?”
“I won’t say it was always easy, but we had enough love and joy to make up for the bad. My Yancy was not a boring man.” Memories softened her smile. “He loved life and he was filled with Celtic songs and stories and romantic dreams and notions.”
“How on earth did you meet?” Meg asked, her problems forgotten as Nita Allen talked of her love for her Yancy.
Another smile curved the older woman’s lips. “He’d come to America and was just roaming around, looking over his new country, he said. We were drawn to each other from the very first and married, despite my parents’ fears of the worst.”
“And the worst never happened?”
“People can be very judgmental,” she said cautiously. “A white man married to an Indian woman...well, it isn’t always accepted. Yancy and I were able to look past it in most cases, and more often than not, people were standoffish rather than mean.”
Meg, whose own background wasn’t something she liked to remember, had often found that to be true with her, as well. With her mother’s lifestyle often the talk of the town, most people just avoided her as if she had the plague.
“Ace is the one who suffered the most. He grew up not really belonging anywhere. He lived with us until he convinced us to let him go live with his grandmother on the reservation, but he didn’t fit in there, either. He was neither white nor Indian. He was a half-breed. Believe me, it’s much more than a name people call you. It took him years to figure out who he is and what his place is in this world.”
Meg looked through the open door into the other room, where the man they were discussing had a small fire burning in the hearth. He still squatted, placing logs just so. It was strange to think of him as vulnerable in any way.
“And as for repayment,” Nita said, “someday you can return the favor.”
“What?” Meg said, as the words brought her thoughts back to their conversation.
“Someday I may need help from you, or someone else will. Then you’ll do what you can for them.”
Yes, she would. Somehow she would find a way to pay back the woman with the kind eyes and gentle manner who had taken her mind off her guilt and hopelessness for a few precious minutes. She would pay her back somehow, if it were the last thing she ever did.
* * *
Ace heard the murmur of the feminine voices coming from the other room. Maybe he should have listened to his mother. Maybe Meg Thomerson would have been a bit more receptive to his apology after some time spent with his mother and a good breakfast, but he had overridden her wishes and insisted on speaking to Meg first. At the time it had seemed imperative that he tell her what was on his mind and in his heart, to try to make her understand, at least as much as he did, about what had happened that day.
Elton’s widow hadn’t wanted to hear what had happened or know how terrible he felt for robbing her of her life’s partner. As rotten as Ace knew Elton Thomerson was, he’d still been a husband and a father, and Meg must have seen something in him to love or she would never have married him.
He brushed his palms on his thighs and stood, planting his hands on his hips and staring into the flickering flames. He wanted to do the right thing, but he could already see that it would be much harder than he’d expected.
The breakfast Nita fixed might have been sawdust for all the enjoyment Meg seemed to take from it. Ace and his mother made desultory conversation while trying not to watch the way Meg pushed the eggs and bacon around on her plate, partially covering them with buttery grits when she thought no one was looking so that they would think she’d eaten at least a few bites.
“Do you think we can go get the children today?” she asked as Ace mopped up some yolk with a piece of biscuit.
“You can’t go anywhere,” Nita said. “Doctor Rachel made that very clear to us. She said the wagon trip out here about did you in, and she doesn’t want anything setting back your recovery.”
“I’ll be better when I can hold them,” Meg insisted.
Ace thought he heard a bit of steel in that voice, the first emotion he’d seen besides her very real fear of him and that disturbing melancholy. He shot his mother a questioning glance, and she answered with a slight lift of her eyebrows and an almost imperceptible shrug of her shoulders.
“I was going to cut down a couple more trees this morning,” he told her, pushing back his chair and carrying his plate to the waiting dishpan of hot sudsy water. “Winter will be here before we know it, and I don’t want you running short of wood.”
He didn’t tell her that if her husband had been taking care of his family instead of robbing people, the wood would have been cut and stacked long ago, making starting a fire a lot easier.
If you hadn’t killed him, he could be here right now, doing just that.
The voice inside his head that reminded him of his sin several times a day put a stop to his mental criticism of Elton Thomerson. Meg had grown up a country girl; Ace figured she knew you needed a mix of seasoned and green logs to keep things going.
He also knew there was no way the fragile woman sitting across from him could have done the work herself. How would she have kept warm when she’d burned the scant supply of wood in the lean-to? Despite his attempt to not think ill of the dead, a muscle in his jaw knotted in anger at a man he’d known only by reputation.
He turned to face her, leaning against the narrow table that sat against the wall. “Would you like for me to go and see about bringing them home instead of chopping more wood?”
“Would you?” she breathed, a glimmer of hope in her eyes.
“I’d be glad to.”
It wasn’t a lie. Though it was fitting that he step up and do the right thing for the woman whose husband he’d shot, Ace hadn’t realized how hard it would be. Not the work—he was no stranger to backbreaking labor—but seeing how badly she was scarred from the whole experience, and how deep her wounds were, left him feeling angry and helpless. He just wanted to fix things for her.
A sharp gasp caught his attention. His gaze flew to Meg’s. The pure terror on her face took him aback. What had happened? Why was she so afraid? Seeing no cause for her alarm, he shot his mother a questioning glance and saw reproach in her eyes.
Understanding